2 comments:

I was getting ready for work last Thursday or Friday and had Morning Joe on in the background. There was a panel of six journalists, including a couple who are ostensibly Democrats. This included Mark Halperin, Willie Geist, Mike Barnacle, Mika Brzezinski, Joe Scarborough, and I'm drawing a blank on the last name.

At one point, Barnacle dropped the line Digby references: "When it was set up, life expectancy was 63."

Everyone at the table nodded, or later spoke, in agreement. Not one person corrected him.

This is a table full of media professionals who talk politics on the air for 3 hours a day, every day, and who spend the rest of their days covering politics in other capacities. And yet not one of them would tell the truth about Social Security. I have a hard time believing that they don't know the truth, because Ezra Klein created a mini scandal several months ago when he corrected someone on the very same show in the very same set who was passing along the same lies.

There are trillions of dollars up for grabs - and the plutocrats want it. They hate -- hate -- having to pay payroll taxes for every employee, and will tell any lie, and hire any number of media liars to lie on their behalf, to mislead the public and destroy this program.

Can you believe the liberal lies the biased liberal media is spreading???1?

I had no idea about this life expectancy fallacy before Doghouse pointed me to Digby. I always unthinkingly thought "Yeah, that must be more or less true" whenever I heard some variation on what Barnicle said. And if I both didn't stop to think about it and never heard any sort of correction, I can't even imagine how much work it's going to take to defeat this "everybody knows" talking point.

(Not saying I'm a world-class skeptic or fully informed about Social Security details, but I'm gonna blow my own horn this once and say I'm well above the average American voter on both, here.)